Cue broken laughter...
I haven't posted on here since May.
I went digging into last years posts today, because I was going to try to come up with something coherent and interesting to say about the end of another year, and realized I walked away half a year ago with a promise to be back next week.
That probably says more about how my year's gone than anything else I'm going to come up with. But I'm going to try anyway. You're welcome.
I haven't posted on here since May.
I went digging into last years posts today, because I was going to try to come up with something coherent and interesting to say about the end of another year, and realized I walked away half a year ago with a promise to be back next week.
That probably says more about how my year's gone than anything else I'm going to come up with. But I'm going to try anyway. You're welcome.
So first let's be overly personal and pretend you want to know how my private life is going.
Dementia is a vile bastard that makes EVERYTHING harder than it needs to be.
That's it. That's pretty much my year in a nutshell.
I was talking to a friend about taking my kid to see Disney's Coco and how I spent the last half of the movie trying to control myself. Nothing is less attractive than being the adult ugly-crying through a kid's movie. I'm talking full sobbing, snot-dripping, ugly crying. I'll try not to give any spoilers, but basically it's a movie about trying not to forget people who have died, and the kid's great-grandma spends the whole movie sitting in a chair slowly turning into a vegetable.
So watching that when my mother is sitting in a chair slowly turning into a vegetable, and Dad's been dead for a year and a half and I still sometimes have dreams where he's not... Yeah. I was still trying not to cry when we walked out of the theater.
And then I had the really unhelpful thought that my parents lost their parents and they weren't weirdly wrecked by it for years afterword. Or they were, and I was so wrapped up in being a kid that I didn't notice. I'm not bad at grief. I'm not self-destructing, there are just moments where it becomes really clear--internally anyway--that I have no bloody clue what I'm doing.
So that's been my 2017. Less painful and underwater than 2016. Still pretty damp and uncomfortable. Here's hoping the trend continues.
Dementia is a vile bastard that makes EVERYTHING harder than it needs to be.
That's it. That's pretty much my year in a nutshell.
I was talking to a friend about taking my kid to see Disney's Coco and how I spent the last half of the movie trying to control myself. Nothing is less attractive than being the adult ugly-crying through a kid's movie. I'm talking full sobbing, snot-dripping, ugly crying. I'll try not to give any spoilers, but basically it's a movie about trying not to forget people who have died, and the kid's great-grandma spends the whole movie sitting in a chair slowly turning into a vegetable.
So watching that when my mother is sitting in a chair slowly turning into a vegetable, and Dad's been dead for a year and a half and I still sometimes have dreams where he's not... Yeah. I was still trying not to cry when we walked out of the theater.
And then I had the really unhelpful thought that my parents lost their parents and they weren't weirdly wrecked by it for years afterword. Or they were, and I was so wrapped up in being a kid that I didn't notice. I'm not bad at grief. I'm not self-destructing, there are just moments where it becomes really clear--internally anyway--that I have no bloody clue what I'm doing.
So that's been my 2017. Less painful and underwater than 2016. Still pretty damp and uncomfortable. Here's hoping the trend continues.
I was sitting around trying to think about what writing, or authorship, or publishing taught me this year. The authorship/publishing thing is rounding down their third year, there should be some take-away there, right? Writing is closing it's sixteenth. So basically most of my adult life.
I offered to be a guest at a conference this year. I haven't heard if I will be yet, probably won't for a couple of months, but I offered. I almost didn't, because why would I? What would I talk about? And then that voice in the back of my head, the one that likes to remember once in a while that I'm a functional freaking thirty-seven-year-old woman, snapped at me. What would I talk about? Publishing children's books, you know, like I have for three years. Editing two journals at once, twice a year, for three years? The entrepreneurial nature of having to teach yourself everything.
The thing writing, and authorship, and publishing taught me this year is that I have skills. Maybe I'm not raking in money, and I'm not on anybody else's radar, but that doesn't mean I don't have skills. I'm absolutely still growing, as a content producer and as an artist. If I want that growth to keep happening, I have to listen. And I have to keep trying bigger things.
Not that I know what those are yet.
In the interest of that, next week we're going to talk about the plan for next year, and about learning how to plan for next year (because one of those skills is sixteen-bloody-years of 'this is what I'm doing as a writer next year' plans).
I offered to be a guest at a conference this year. I haven't heard if I will be yet, probably won't for a couple of months, but I offered. I almost didn't, because why would I? What would I talk about? And then that voice in the back of my head, the one that likes to remember once in a while that I'm a functional freaking thirty-seven-year-old woman, snapped at me. What would I talk about? Publishing children's books, you know, like I have for three years. Editing two journals at once, twice a year, for three years? The entrepreneurial nature of having to teach yourself everything.
The thing writing, and authorship, and publishing taught me this year is that I have skills. Maybe I'm not raking in money, and I'm not on anybody else's radar, but that doesn't mean I don't have skills. I'm absolutely still growing, as a content producer and as an artist. If I want that growth to keep happening, I have to listen. And I have to keep trying bigger things.
Not that I know what those are yet.
In the interest of that, next week we're going to talk about the plan for next year, and about learning how to plan for next year (because one of those skills is sixteen-bloody-years of 'this is what I'm doing as a writer next year' plans).
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